Truth Be Told Presents: She Has A Name American Public Media

Tonya tries to make sense of a double-whammy: news that she has a sister and the devastating discovery about her whereabouts. In this episode, Tonya begins her quest to unravel how a sister she never knew about could end up as a Jane Doe.

Who was Anita outside of the image Antonio shared with Tonya?  And how can Tonya’s exploration of her short life help us understand what led to her disappearance and murder? In this episode, Tonya goes back to Anita’s early years and the choices she made as a young woman in Detroit to survive.

In the late seventies and early eighties, things were looking up for Anita. She was in her early twenties and coming out of a low point in her life with the death of her mother. Antonio remembers a stable home life, a step-father that he loved and not really wanting for anything. Until Anita's life takes a downward turn with the return of a childhood friend who comes home from prison.

How could Tonya, Anita, and Antonio go almost a lifetime without knowing each other? We explore the tangled roots of this family tree and the man Tonya, Anita, and Antonio all have in common – O.C. Hill. 

What does a boy hold on to when he realizes his mother is gone? The ways she taught him to survive - and the creation of falsehoods, omissions, and a version of the truth he’s created to make it through each day. In this episode of She Has A Name, Tonya discovers something about Antonio’s past she never knew before - one that mirrors his mother's life in the years before she disappeared. The discovery opens up insights into the depths of Antonio’s pain and the life he yearns to create as he moves toward healing.

Host Tonya Mosley has spent most of her career telling other people’s stories, now she is focusing on her own family. In the summer of 1987, Tonya’s sister Anita disappeared without a trace. It took 33 years of searching and her son’s DNA to connect Anita to a grave just outside of Detroit. But finding the body was just the beginning: Anita had been murdered. This isn’t just another whodunit, She Has A Name peels back the layers of Anita’s murder to reveal a city fighting for its own survival.